Google pressing for fast adoption of royalty-free VP9 video codec

Last week at I/O 2013, Google said it is nearly finished developing the new royalty-free VP9 video codec. The new specification is available now for testing, and will be officially finalized on June 17, reports CNET.

It would be interesting to see how VP9 and HVEC compare in reality. One major concern about HVEC versus H.264 is that the former requires much more CPU power to decode, which inevitably translates into more battery life sucked out by mobile devices. How does VP9 compare in this department?